movie rental

As I sit down to write this week's Grouse column, I find myself having to work through one of those rather dull and annoying headaches, which, I'm almost certain, is from repeatedly slapping myself in the forehead over the course of the last few days. It's not that I'm a masochist -- I'm just upset with myself for not being the first to think of a Netflix-style site for books and book lovers.

It was in the third hour of a bewildering odyssey into the iTunes rental wilderness (I and my crew were fiercely at arms with a six-foot DVI cable) when a quote I had read in the paper earlier that day came back to me with sudden, crystalline truthiness. It was in a brief New York Times piece recounting a staged talk between exmedia mogul Michael Eisner and polymath Mark Cuban at last weeks SXSW Interactive conference.